Change the Angle

This is an easy one to do , because you just need to do some walking (or maybe some crouching). Whatever you’re photographing, most people see it straight-on from eye-level. Changing up the angle that you take your photograph from can reveal new sides, both literally and figuratively, of your object.

Trying getting up really close and crouching under your subject, or even lay on the ground and take a shot aiming straight upward. Or take the opposite tack, and find a way to get above your subject to look down on it. It doesn’t have to be the vertical angle that you change, either—it could be horizontal. For example, if you’re photographing a building that most people will have seen from a specific street, you can take it from a side street.

In some cases, taking a new angle on your subject will make it almost unrecognizable, and your viewer will have to take a moment to figure out exactly what they’re looking at—and if they take an extra moment to look at it, you know you’ve taken a unique photo!

In general, there are rules of compositionHow to Compose a Photograph: 5 Essential Rules to FollowHow to Compose a Photograph: 5 Essential Rules to FollowIf you want to get really good at photography, there are some vital rules around image composition that you should consider. Here are five of the most important.Read More that people tend to follow: fill the frame with your subject, follow the rule of thirds, keep the golden ratio in mind, and so on. But sometimes you should break those rules in the interest of creating an eye-catching photograph. Filling just one part of the frame with your subject, or walking further away so that your picture contains a lot more background (as in the photo above), can completely change the feel of the photo.

Group photos are so often done in straight lines, but creating angles in the composition can add a really unique look to your shots (some photographers recommend going for triangles when photographing even numbers of people for this reason). Flat, straight lines can be interesting too, but if you can get away them from, you should give it a try and see what happens.

And as you can see above, sometimes adding something completely different to your composition can work wonders. Even if it partially obscures your subject, the presence of another object can make for a photo that comes together in a completely different way. If you would have described the above image to me, I would have thought that it wouldn’t work very well as a photo, becuase it breaks a number of composition guidelines. But I love it.

Play with Shadows

When you first start taking photos, it’s helpful to take a lot of your pictures in broad daylight, so you can see how other factors change your resulting photographs. It’s easier to see your subjects, and you don’t have to worry about part of the image being obscured by shadows. But you can use shadows to add a unique style to your photos with some practice.

Beyond simply adding depth, which shadows are great for, you can obscure certain parts of your photo to bring the viewer’s attention to other parts of the frame. In the image above, a sense of mystery is added to a simple picture of a man waiting at a bus stop. Sometimes the shadows can even become the focus of the entire photograph:

Add Blur

Most of the time, we try to avoid blur in our photographs, as it’s evidence of an unstable camera during the shot. But sometimes, blur can be used to your advantage to add a feeling of motion or instability to the photo. The cyclist above, instead of being frozen in place, definitely has an element of movement that’s difficult to capture without motion blur.

Choose Focal Colors

It can be tempting to try to include a lot of different colors in your photo in an attempt to capture the feeling of being in a scene, but this can often lead to photos that are just too busy. Instead, try focusing on one or two focal colors that really stand out in the photo.

If you want to get creative with editing, you can make everything in your photo black and white except for your focal colors, giving you a photo like this:

Using this strategy lets you focus on a single color even if the setting in which you took the photo isn’t amenable to the kind of photo you’re trying to take.

Or, if you want to go in the opposite direction, you can get a number of different objects of the same color into the frame to create an overwhelming sense of color, as in the photo above. You can do pretty much whatever you want with color—the point is to be cognizant of how you’re using it when you take the photo.